Claim your profile by logging into webmasters’ forums such as Bing Local, Google Places and Yahoo Local. Go through the mandatory verification process and start updating your profile.

2. Uploading Pictures.

Upload pictures at local listing websites to raise awareness about you and your business. Remember, they don’t necessarily have to be professional images. However, they represent you and your business. Hence, make sure that they are nice and decent.

3. Encourage Reviews.

Ask for users to review and comet on your website so that you may have the perfect understanding of all the places where you probably are lacking. Right at your contact or “Thank You” page, on all invoices and on all email communications. Make it a point to say “Hey we’d love it if you gave our business a review on Google/Bing/Yahoo Local.” These reviews, good or bad, make your business more creditable to future customers.

4. Bad reviews are good.

No company is perfect, so when users see all positive reviews, something looks wrong and they may actually choose a different company. Bad reviews are a part of any business and a few bad reviews can make the good reviews that much better. Obviously, you don’t want to encourage bad reviews.

5. Add local phone number.

On your website, make sure to publish a local phone number in text. This will add a lot of authenticity to

The above steps might appear as elementary but are equally important in laying the foundation for a decent and profitable website.

If you have been in the internet marketing business for a considerable time, you might already be aware with the power of SEO; its significance, strategies, returns, the works.

In the contemporary e-commerce setup, people are of the notion that SEO is a means to an end in itself and getting high page rankings and, subsequently, high traffic is some kind of a magical elixir. Well, the news is, IT”S NOT!

Getting visitors to your website’s very front door isn’t the be all and end all of SEO. Unless and until you are optimising your webpages to as more of a sales pitch, online or offline, you probably are not even ready to engage in SEO. On the contrary, if you think your website stinks, you might as well try to de-SEO it completely, for sake of retaining credibility and building a goodwill of sorts. The first thing you want to figure out is what exactly should be the USP of your website.  Once you have figured that out, it’s only then that it makes sense to optimize your website.

As a webmaster-in-the-making, your primary concern should be retaining visitors instead of attracting them. Now, why do I say that? Because, you will get ample opportunities and resources at your disposal to accomplish the latter. Initially, focus your attention and energies on coming out with a great product (read website) so that you may proceed with marketing and optimizing it with full confidence.